Lean In

through each day. Still, Dave and I recognized that if I waited until the timing was exactly right, the opportunity would be gone. My decision to take the job was personal, as these decisions always are. And there were days in my first six months at Facebook when I wondered whether I’d made the right choice. By the end of my first year, I knew I had … for me.
    The birth of a child instantly changes how we define ourselves. Women become mothers. Men become fathers. Couples become parents. Our priorities shift in fundamental ways. Parenting may be the most rewarding experience, but it is also the hardest and most humbling. If there were a right way to raise kids, everyone would do it. Clearly, that is not the case.
    One of the immediate questions new parents face is who will provide primary care for a child. The historical choice has been the mother. Breast-feeding alone has made this both the logical and the biological choice. But the advent of the modern-day breast pump has changed the equation. At Google, I would lock my office door and pump during conference calls. People would ask, “What’s that sound?” I would respond, “What sound?” When they would insist that there was a loud beeping noise that they could hear on the phone, I would say, “Oh, there’s a fire truck across the street.” I thought I was pretty clever until I realized that others on the call were sometimes in the same building and knew there was no fire truck.
Busted
.
    Despite modern methods that can minimize the impact of biological imperatives, women still do the vast majority of child care. As a result, becoming a parent decreases workforce participation for women but not men. 5 Forty-three percent of highly qualified women with children are leaving careers, or “off-ramping,” for a period of time. 6
    Women who are the most likely to leave the workforce are concentrated at opposite ends of the earning scale, married to men who earn the least and the most. In 2006, only 20 percent of mothers whose husband’s earnings landed in the middle (between the twenty-fifth and seventy-fifth percentiles) were out of the labor force. In contrast, a whopping 52 percent of mothers with husbands in the bottom quarter and 40 percent of mothers with husbands in the top 5 percent were out of the labor force. 7 Obviously, their reasons for staying home are vastly different. Mothers married to the lowest-earning men struggle to find jobs that pay enough to cover child care costs, which are increasingly unaffordable. Over the past decade, child care costs have risen twice as fast as the median income of families with children. 8 The cost for two children (an infant and a four-year-old) to go to a day care center is greater than the annual median rent payment in every state in the country. 9
    Women married to men with greater resources leave for a variety of reasons, but one important factor is the number of hours that their husbands work. When husbands work fifty or more hours per week, wives with children are 44 percent more likely to quit their jobs than wives with children whose husbands work less. 10 Many of these mothers are those with the highest levels of education. A 2007 survey of Harvard Business School alumni found that while men’s rates of full-time employment never fell below 91 percent, only 81 percent of women who graduated in the early 2000s and 49 percent of women who graduated in the early 1990s were working full-time. 11 Of Yale alumni who had reached their forties by 2000, only 56 percent of the women remained in the workforce, compared with 90 percent of the men. 12 This exodus of highly educated women is a major contributor to the leadership gap.
    While it’s hard to predict how an individual will react to becoming a parent, it’s easy to predict society’s reaction. When a couple announces that they are having a baby, everyonesays “Congratulations!” to the man and “Congratulations! What are you planning on doing about work?” to the woman. The broadly held assumption is that raising their child is her responsibility. In more than thirty years, this perception has changed very little. A survey of the Princeton class of 1975 found that 54 percent of the women foresaw work-family conflict compared to 26 percent of the men. The same survey of the Princeton class of 2006 found that 62 percent of the women anticipated work-family conflict compared to only 33 percent of the men. Three decades separate the studies and